United States

We conducted a household study over the course of seven months, during which the commercially available Anki Vector robot was introduced to eight demographically diverse private homes for participants’ free use. Based on our findings, we conclude that the adoption process of personal companion robots slightly differs from that of functional vacuum cleaning robots, but may not differ substantially from technology adoption processes in general.

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

Human Social Feedback for Efficient Interactive Reinforcement Agent Learning

technology adoption

ethnographic study

field trial

social companion robot

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. This theme also touches upon people's expectations and perceptions of robots, as well as other social, cognitive and cultural factors that will influence human-robot interactions. We will have a special session/track on this topic, invite targeted submissions and include plenary speakers who are specialist in this area. We sincerely hope that this focus will help enlighten the design-thinking of all of us as we fabricate and program our own various systems.

To access RO-MAN Virtual 2021, [please register here.](https://ro-man2021.org/registration/)

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. 

technical paper

We focused on neonatal resuscitation, which is difficult to train clinically, and our long- term goal is a neonatal resuscitation training system that can simulate cases and can feedback interactively based on quantitative evaluation of the procedures. In this study, we developed the neonatal simulator that has a respiratory movement simulating mechanism and a chest compression measurement mechanism. Through an interview with neonatologists, the fidelity of respiratory movements and the possibility of evaluating chest compression with the developed simulator were assessed.

Robocentric Conversational Group Discovery

For remote telesurgery, the bandwidth requirement can be reduced by transferring atomic surgical actions (“surgemes") instead of the low-level kinematic information. However, such a policy requires accurate recognition of these surgemes. Surgeme recognition requires the surgical data for training the classifier. In this paper, we employ transfer learning to reduce the data requirement by transferring knowledge from training task (peg-transfer) to a surgical task (debridement). With different ablations we demonstrate that tranfer learning requires 40% less data than with no-transfer.

Dexterous Skill Transfer between Surgical Procedures for Teleoperated Robotic Surgery

In this paper we analyze the text of 20000+ technical robotics papers in order to identify the visions and values that are embedded in our papers. We identify themes of visions, the relative presence of different visions and values - taking care to consider explicitness, language strategies and relevant literature in STS and HRI. We draw several paths forward and discussions from these insights.

Normative roboticists: the visions and values of technical robotics papers

In this study, we examined whether the likelihood of attributing intentionality to robots is influenced by the human-likeness of errors during HRI. To this end, we designed an experimental protocol in which users performed a melody in a joint task with the iCub robot. We programmed the iCub robot to make an error in 60% of the repetitions. Before and after the joint musical task, we administered the InStance Test to evaluate the likelihood of treating the robot as an intentional agent. Results showed that mechanical errors during HRI reduced intentionality attribution toward the robot.

Effects of Erring Behavior in a Human-Robot Joint Musical Task on Adopting Intentional Stance Toward the iCub Robot

This work investigates how trust, understanding between a human operator and a robot, and the Locus of Control personality trait, evolve and affect Human-Robot Interaction in mixed-initiative robotic systems. We present the results from an experiment in which operators remotely controlled a mobile robot in navigation tasks, switching dynamically between two different levels of autonomy. Evidence suggests that operators trusted and developed an understanding of the robotic systems in mixed-initiative control, where trust and understanding increased over time.

Trust, Shared Understanding and Locus of Control in Mixed-Initiative Robotic Systems

The paper discusses ethical issues in dialogue engagement to build a long-term trusting relationship between a human and a robot agent over a period of time.

Do You Remember Me? Ethical Issues in Long-Term Social Robot Interactions

Within the present research, nine different communication strategies were examined for a service robot. The communication style (humanlike friendly, humanlike professional, machinelike) and modality (auditive male, auditive female, visual) of communication was varied and their influence on system evaluation regarding competence, warmth, discomfort, embodiment and preferences were investigated in an online study. The results of the study indicate that a humanlike communication is rated more competent, warmer, less discomforting, and is generally preferred.

“Oh no, my instructions were wrong!” An Exploratory Pilot Towards Children’s Trust in Social Robots

Respecting personal spaces of other people is something we also expect from robots. But what if robots need to invade our personal space, for example when several people are talking and there is no way for the robot to get around them? In a user study, we investigated the influence of different behaviors of a robot of traversing these people on the perception of the participants.

Do You Mind if I Pass Through? Studying the Appropriate Robot Behavior when Traversing two Conversing People in a Hallway Setting

This work makes steps in the direction of integrating task constraints in visual action planning frameworks. The proposed approach handles robot-human interaction and employs LSTMs directly in the latent space representation achieving high accuracy.

Learning Task Constraints in Visual-Action Planning from Demonstrations

We describe INPRO, a framework that enables robots to learn board exercises by demonstration, with the aim of assisting caregivers during the monitoring of patients. INPRO encodes the learning task as a SAT planning problem, and comes up with a explainable list of STRIPS operators that summarizes the rules of the exercise. We validate our approach using two configurations of feedback in a user study with 37 participants.

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